Gratuitous curlicues

Imagine that you're at a railway bookstall in one of the years either side of the First World War, and you have just bought a cheap classic. It's a shilling hardback, of the sort attacked by Max Beerbohm near the beginning of his essay "How Shall I Word It?" (1910): "What pleasure could I get from trying to cope with a masterpiece printed in diminutive grey-ish type on a semi-transparent little grey-ish page?" Now open the book. There's a good chance that you already have an answer to Max's question, because you have been confronted by something like this:

Grand opening: from a 1920s Everyman Ben Jonson

Explosions of arts-and-crafts greenery in this style are found in all of the first generation of Everyman's Library classics. They are the reason that, while scavenging at the bargain end of secondhand bookshops, I often find myself choosing a rackety Everyman from, say, 1919 over a plainer but infinitely more solid example from the Thirties or later. And there is what I think – hope – might be a tribute in the new batch of Penguin Great Ideas covers (via): Ruskin's The Lamp of Memory is done up in the same class of handsomely proportioned decorative border, with an inspirational quotation proudly displayed in caps.

I fear that the designer, David Pearson, is more likely to be paying tribute to the sources of the Everyman design: the Kelmscott Chaucer and its descendants. For the Everyman title pages are not considered to be quite in the best taste. They are mass-produced Ruskinism, which goes against the spirit of the style. The borders, and the quotations displayed to the left of the title, vary not by individual volume but by genre. Every book classed as "Poetry and the Drama" comes, like the one illustrated above, with the endorsement of Shelley – although I'm not sure that Ben Jonson's early plays were what he had in mind when he wrote his Defence of Poetry. Anything filed as biography opens with a fanfare from Milton: "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life." Oh, and the border on the left-hand page is simply the right-hand one flipped – complete with the designer's initials, RLK, in mirror-writing.

The greatest single engine of diffusion was the Everyman Library, launched in 1906. The publisher, J.M. Dent, was himself a product of the autodidact tradition, and he hit on a winning formula (later exploited on an even grander scale by Penguin): large print-runs, low prices, handsome design, classic authors. The last of these was the key to the prestige of the Everyman series: Rose describes Dent's literary tastes as â€˜naive, old-fashioned, petit bourgeois and blindly worshipful', but he was shrewdly advised by his general editor, Ernest Rhys, another self-made man of letters, and between them they correctly judged the deferential seriousness of their potential market. Rose finds it both understandable and impressive that â€˜Dent was willing to invest in so many lengthy and intimidating classics: George Grote's History of Greece in 12 volumes, Hakluyt's Voyages . . . in eight, J.A. Froude's History of England in ten, 15 volumes of Balzac and six of Ibsen.' No less impressive was the stamina and catholicity of the implied Everyman reader, and the viability of such publishing ventures speaks of a hunger for reading on a mammoth scale.

These title pages became part of the legacy of that auto-didact tradition, too. In the introduction to her essay collection Expletives Deleted, Angela Carter brandishes the Milton "life-blood" slogan, half-remembered, as one of her earliest experiences of reading; it is part of her memory of her journalist father, who bequeathed her "bad language and a taste for the print", and also of her mother: "Both my parents had left school at fifteen, they were among the last generation of men and women whose minds were furnished out of curiosity about the printed word." We could call it the Everyman generation.